Participant and Match Rules

Participant rules define who can compete and how teams must be structured. Match rules define how individual matches are played and scored. Both are set at the tournament level and apply across all stages unless overridden at the stage level.

Where to find it

• Participant rules: Projects → [Your Project] → [Tournament] → Settings → Participant
• Match rules: Projects → [Your Project] → [Tournament] → Settings → Match

Step by step

Participant rules

1. Set minimum and maximum team size — Define how many players a roster must have. The minimum is the lowest number allowed to register; the maximum is the hard cap per team.
2. Enable country restrictions — Restrict registration to participants from specific countries or regions. Useful for regional qualifiers.
3. Enable birthdate restrictions — Set a minimum or maximum age. Players whose birthdate falls outside the allowed range will be blocked from registering.
4. Require permanent teams — When enabled, participants must register using a pre-existing team in the system. Ad-hoc team creation at the point of registration is disabled. Use this when you want to ensure teams have an established identity before entering.
5. Set eligibility requirements — Combine any of the above restrictions to define the full eligibility profile for your event.

Match rules

6. Configure the default match format — Choose the number of maps or games per match: Best of 1, Best of 3, or Best of 5. This applies to all matches in the tournament unless a specific stage overrides it.
7. Set the score reporting method — Choose who can submit match results:
   • Organizer only — only tournament staff can enter scores.
   • Both sides — both the organizer and team captains can submit scores; a dispute is flagged when submissions differ.
8. Configure match check-in — Enable a check-in window before each match. Teams that do not check in within the window are automatically marked as no-shows.
9. Set overtime and tiebreaker rules — Define what happens when a match ends in a draw, including whether overtime rounds are played and how ties are broken.

What happens next

With participant and match rules in place, you are ready to configure how the competitive structure is laid out. See Tournament Structure and Formats to set up brackets and stages, or Seeding and Placement to control how participants are ordered in the draw. When registration is not yet set up, see Registration Settings.